Comment by echelon

> Doing this basic formatting in ascii text is just mind-numbingly stupid.

People have been typesetting research papers in LaTeX for awhile, and that's not much different. The beauty of plaintext is that it is easy to both read and author, and almost any tool can do the job.

> Doing this basic formatting in ascii text is just mind-numbingly stupid.

We write programs in text, and they're capable of exhibiting an unlimited assortment of behaviors.

Using a wysiwyg tool is burdensome, inaccessible, hard to automate, and doesn't integrate with the myriad of other tools we have available.